Chelsea Morning

by Joni Mitchell

Woke up, it was a Chelsea morning
And the first thing that I heard
Was a song outside my window
And the traffic wrote the words
It came ringing up like Christmas bells
And rapping up like pipes and drums

Oh, won't you stay
We'll put on the day
And we'll wear it 'till the night comes

Woke up, it was a Chelsea morning
And the first thing that I saw
Was the sun through yellow curtains
And a rainbow on the wall *
Blue, red, green and gold to welcome you
Crimson crystal beads to beckon

Oh, won't you stay
We'll put on the day
There's a sun show every second

Now the curtain opens on a portrait of today
And the streets are paved with passersby
And pigeons fly
And papers lie
Waiting to blow away

Woke up, it was a Chelsea morning
And the first thing that I knew
There was milk and toast and honey
And a bowl of oranges, too
And the sun poured in like butterscotch
And stuck to all my senses

Oh, won't you stay
We'll put on the day
And we'll talk in present tenses

When the curtain closes
And the rainbow runs away
I will bring you incense
Owls by night
By candlelight
By jewel-light
If only you will stay
Pretty baby, won't you
Wake up, it's a Chelsea morning

Additional information:

*Footnotes

Rainbow on the wall: According to Karen O'Brien's Joni Mitchell: Shadows and Light "the upbeat pop-ish "Chelsea Morning" [was] written during a visit to Philadelphia, after Mitchell and a group of women who were working in a club where she was performing had found chunks of brightly coloured glass discarded in an alleyway. They collected the glass and took it home to create mobiles with copper wire and coat hangers. Mitchell took hers back to New York and hung it in the window of her small apartment in Chelsea; when the glass caught the sunlight, the colours shimmered around the walls." (p. 97)

However, Joni tells a different story. At her October 12, 1967 show at Philadelphia's 2nd Fret, she talks about buying stained glass windows for $5 apiece from a building that was being torn down and taking them with her wherever she moved. In her concert at the White Swan in Leicester in September of 1967, Joni paired this song with Come to the Sunshine. In her introduction to "Chelsea Morning" she says "This is my Chelsea Song. It's also full of morning and rainbows and much the same things because it was inspired it was inspired by the same set of stained glass windows only I moved them into a New York apartment. But it could be Chelsea in London. After I moved to New York, I spent a lot of time on a street called Bleecker Street, and on Bleecker Street is a theatre called the Garrick Theatre, and in the Garrick theatre are the Mothers of Invention. And, uh, they're coming over pretty soon. So this is Chelsea Morning, rainbow sunshine song influenced slightly by the Mothers of Invention."

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